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I have never heard an adequate explanation for the blood-soaked towel that Weggery's partner found in their flat on the morning the bodies were discovered.

Was the blood DNA tested?

__________________► 9/11 was a terrorist attack by Islamic extremists; 12 Apollo astronauts really did walk on the Moon; JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald,who acted alone.
► Never underestimate the power of the Internet to lend unwarranted credibility to the colossally misinformed. - Jay Utah
► Heisenberg's Law - The weirdness of the Universe is inversely proportional to the scale at which you observe it, or not.

Weggery is a gullible fool to believe the false police solution, but he had no opportunity to conceal a crime,

Rubbish, he had plenty of time!

We know that the time of death in the first trial was about right (early evening) and that the prosecution moved the goalposts (including getting an expert witness to do a 180° about face on the stomach contents for the retrial) to get around the impossible trip from Petone to Palmy and back.

With a time of death before 9 pm (which is what the original, and correct testimony as regards the stomach contents supported) Weggery would have had two hours or more to clean-up. More than enough time to commit the murders, clean up, and get home and back into bed before his partner arrived home. He could have used the same get up that Lundy was accused of using (overalls, safety gear etc) and bundled the whole lit into a big plastic bin-liner and driven halfway to the other side of town and disposed of it in a dumpster.

Originally Posted by Samson

and the motive is absurd.

More rubbish! The annals of crime are replete with people who have murdered members of their own families to prevent their dirty little secrets getting out (IIRC, you support exactly that motive when you accuse Robin Bain of the Bain family murders!

Originally Posted by Samson

There is no evidence at all that he was in trouble with Christine over improprieties with Amber

...and there often isn't in a situation where kiddie fiddling is going on within a family. The fact that he was only caught previously when he was 14 is irrelevant. That sort of behaviour often starts in adolescence.

I think Glen Weggery is a viable suspect; far more viable than Mark Lundy ever was, and keeping Christine quiet about such a family secret is a stronger motive than killing her for the increased insurance money to cover a debt when,

a. Lundy didn't ask for the increase, and
b. The policy had not been activated yet
c. the payout would not have even come close to covering the debt!

__________________► 9/11 was a terrorist attack by Islamic extremists; 12 Apollo astronauts really did walk on the Moon; JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald,who acted alone.
► Never underestimate the power of the Internet to lend unwarranted credibility to the colossally misinformed. - Jay Utah
► Heisenberg's Law - The weirdness of the Universe is inversely proportional to the scale at which you observe it, or not.

With respect to you all, I can send you all a dossier. This has been offered before.
Just an email address.
Amazingly, this offer has been taken up by an Australian recentlly.
So he knows everything while New Zealanders know nothing.

With respect to you all, I can send you all a dossier. This has been offered before.
Just an email address.
Amazingly, this offer has been taken up by an Australian recentlly.
So he knows everything while New Zealanders know nothing.

I don't trust email addresses and don't see how other cases relate to the tosser

__________________I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun. With today’s Internet technology we should be able to tell within 72-hours if a potential gun owner has a record.

With respect to you all, I can send you all a dossier. This has been offered before.
Just an email address.
Amazingly, this offer has been taken up by an Australian recentlly.
So he knows everything while New Zealanders know nothing.

Got joke too late

__________________I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun. With today’s Internet technology we should be able to tell within 72-hours if a potential gun owner has a record.

"Thus, this distinctive group of homicide victims was found to express both elevated frequency of DNA mixtures together with highly informative value of the secondary foreign profiles, as compared to other studied populations. These findings support an important aspect for the criminal investigation in murder cases, where a struggle may have ensued and the identification of an additional profile found in a mixture from a fingernail sample may point to a possible perpetrator of the crime."

This quote is from the abstract.

__________________“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.” – Winston Churchill

"Thus, this distinctive group of homicide victims was found to express both elevated frequency of DNA mixtures together with highly informative value of the secondary foreign profiles, as compared to other studied populations. These findings support an important aspect for the criminal investigation in murder cases, where a struggle may have ensued and the identification of an additional profile found in a mixture from a fingernail sample may point to a possible perpetrator of the crime."

I just read this blog post. Dr. Temple-Camp knows little to nothing of how much the prosecution's case changed at the retrial. More importantly he documents that he has become contaminated by irrelevant information. This is how one can more easily fall prey to confirmation bias.

__________________“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.” – Winston Churchill

"The job, he says, is satisfying the needs of the living as well as offering a cause for the death of a loved one. Nothing could be worse, he says, than hearing at the end of the process that a coroner's verdict of death was from unknown causes.

That was one of the reasons he was pleased to be vindicated in the famous "speck of brain tissue" on Mark Lundy's shirt at the end of the drawn-out murder trial saga. It was the "killer blow" to the defence case, he wrote.

Another reason it mattered was that the upholding of his identification of the tissue also upheld the critical value of the pathological evidence to the case. For a while, it looked like a matter of experts disagreeing, leaving Temple-Camp to wonder if science could be "bought". As far as he was concerned brain tissue was a basic that a medical student could identify and that was the end of it.

But not until world experts agreed on what the tissue was, conclusions that supported Temple-Camp's findings, was the Lundy case as good as closed.

You get the feeling that Temple-Camp had to bite his tongue and resist the temptation to interject and holler "bad science" while watching from the public gallery what was being said at the Lundy appeal hearing before the Privy Council in London.

He said some "bizarre assertions" were made by the defence, during which he felt his reputation was being impugned. It was all lawyers and there was no right of cross-examination.

He cites approvingly what murder mystery novelist Val McDermid had to say in her one non-fiction work, The Anatomy of Crime: "If it suits the lawyers' narrative they will undermine first a scientist's testimony and then their good name." "

I am looking at this passage in vicinity following location 4038, where he says to his daughter when dining during the privy council hearings

"I'm looking forward to a proper retrial for purely selfish reasons. I would like to know one way or another whether I was right or wrong."

On multiple occasions prior to this he has echoed Miller's 100% certainty.
On the other hand he has described the Aunt Minnie method where you just know it is Aunt Minnie without hard science to support your sighting, to tell us it is brain (or Aunt Minnie).

Which is it? Let a jury determine and settle for Dr Temple-Camp, or encourage Dr Temple-Camp to show us his workings.

For example at location 3974 he says

"Even medical students can recognise brain tissue at a glance".

So let us put this together.

1. Even medical students can recognise brain tissue at a glance.
2. I'm looking forward to a proper retrial for purely selfish reasons. I would like to know one way or another whether I was right or wrong.

Is this the way aircraft engineers operate? I always ask this question because they hold people's lives in their care.

"You get the feeling that Temple-Camp had to bite his tongue and resist the temptation to interject and holler "bad science" while watching from the public gallery what was being said at the Lundy appeal hearing before the Privy Council in London." (from the link above)

Actually, "bad science" is an understated description of the prosecution's case at both trials. One, the prosecution put forth messenger RNA results in 2015 based on a method that had not been peer-reviewed. Messenger RNA ordinarily degrades within hours or days, yet the sample was fourteen years old. Two of the world's leading authorities on this branch of science (Bustin and Venneman) ripped the data to shreds, but it never should have been heard by the jury in the first place. Two, the Privy Council was absolutely correct to indicate that immunohistochemistry (IHC) is not a technique that in its natural setting is used to identify unknown tissue, let alone a sample that had been treated in a manner far different from the ordinary fixation process. One cannot move a technique from the realm of pathology into the realm of forensics, not giving serious thought to unique false positives and false negatives, and expect anything other than nonsensical results. Three, elsewhere Dr. Temple-Camp mentions Dr. Pang and the time of death. Is he unaware that Dr. Pang's testimony in 2015 was 180 degrees opposite his 2002 testimony? Neither the Crown's 2002 alleged TOD nor its 2015 alleged TOD make a lick of sense.

__________________“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.” – Winston Churchill

1. Even medical students can recognise brain tissue at a glance.
2. I'm looking forward to a proper retrial for purely selfish reasons. I would like to know one way or another whether I was right or wrong.

Is this the way aircraft engineers operate? I always ask this question because they hold people's lives in their care.

I wouldn't fly in a plane he designed. If he's presenting expert testimony for the prosecution that can put someone away for 20 years, you'd think he would have no doubt that he was right - otherwise he should have said as such at trial.

Anyway, IIRC he seemed supportive of Pang's evidence in the small extract I read in the Herald...which really doesn't say much, because Pang's methodology and results have been pilloried.

I wouldn't fly in a plane he designed. If he's presenting expert testimony for the prosecution that can put someone away for 20 years, you'd think he would have no doubt that he was right - otherwise he should have said as such at trial.

Anyway, IIRC he seemed supportive of Pang's evidence in the small extract I read in the Herald...which really doesn't say much, because Pang's methodology and results have been pilloried.

I will forward some correspondence Hard Cheese, Temple-Camp has more or less AK47'd the crown.
All fun and games.

In the Lundy case we are supposed to believe that he executed a near immaculate clean-up, except for one small stain on his shirt. Miraculously this material was not degraded over the course of months. That is highly implausible, but there were many others in the Crown's 2002 case. The Crown scrapped most of these in its slightly less ridiculous 2015 case, but it added one more, that messenger RNA, which ordinarily shows measurable degradation within days, lasted fourteen years. The whole case reeks of confirmation bias.

My previous comment was not cleared at the stuff site. Maybe this one will be.

__________________“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.” – Winston Churchill

As Fatherbrown I have attempted to post the following on that page from stuff:

I attended the book launch. Despite the promotional material indicating the Mark Edward Lundy case is a victory for Doctor Temple-Camp, it was never mentioned. This is a mystery to me. There is an appeal pending in October, and I see no reason to not keep it at the forefront of discussion. I have read his passages on Mark Lundy in the book carefully, and I conclude that he says that the plausibility of Mr Lundy's guilt, when combined with the revised time of death in the 2015 retrial, requires Amber Lundy, an 8 year old, to have eaten a second MacDonalds meal after midnight. However evidence shows only one was purchased at 6pm previously. Could Dr Temple-Camp be encouraged to clarify this matter? I guess this will be thoroughly discussed at the appeal level now we find that Dr Temple-Camp was so close to the stomach contents phase of the 2001 autopsy, and that he has published an important book so close to this appeal. I further note he claims that the defence agreed before this 2015 trial that Christine's brains were on Mark's shirt.

"But there were some significant differences. First, the brain tissue evidence was finally decided. Two top international forensic neuropathology experts, Dr Daniel du Plessis for the Crown and Professor Colin Smith for the defence, collaborated and re-examined Rod Miller’s work, repeated it and carried out more special stains. The answer was unequivocal. It was brain on the shirt, beyond any doubt whatsoever. The defence now had to concede absolutely and without reservation that this was so."

I have carefully read the trial transcripts, and the above quote makes an incorrect assertion, the defence did not concede this was brain on the shirt. At times in the trial it was suggested by Daniel Du Plessis for the crown, and Colin Smith it was CNS tissue. Most CNS tissue is not brain as I understand it.

I think it is important that Stuff seeks clarification from Dr Temple-Camp on these matters.

In the Lundy case we are supposed to believe that he executed a near immaculate clean-up, except for one small stain on his shirt. Miraculously this material was not degraded over the course of months. That is highly implausible, but there were many others in the Crown's 2002 case. The Crown scrapped most of these in its slightly less ridiculous 2015 case, but it added one more, that messenger RNA, which ordinarily shows measurable degradation within days, lasted fourteen years. The whole case reeks of confirmation bias.

My previous comment was not cleared at the stuff site. Maybe this one will be.

Chris, do you reckon on what you know of Temple Camp's book it could have been published and distributed in USA?
Considering any analogous case and its progress through the system.

Good luck Mark, you're going to need it, because you fighting against a corrupt, closed and incestuous legal system where judges protect their chums at all costs.

__________________► 9/11 was a terrorist attack by Islamic extremists; 12 Apollo astronauts really did walk on the Moon; JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald,who acted alone.
► Never underestimate the power of the Internet to lend unwarranted credibility to the colossally misinformed. - Jay Utah
► Heisenberg's Law - The weirdness of the Universe is inversely proportional to the scale at which you observe it, or not.

Good luck Mark, you're going to need it, because you fighting against a corrupt, closed and incestuous legal system where judges protect their chums at all costs.

I spent the day in court.
Jonathan Eaton started by detailing all the things at the crime scene that pointed to the real killer and away from Mark.

The court are allowing an extra day because there are important matters and everyone must be heard.
To be frank, it looked like a nightmare day at the office for serial false prosecutors Philip Morgan and Ben Van derkolk. They are being called out.
Times they are a changin'

Link1
"Rules are needed to police how "novel science" is used in court, according to Mark Lundy's lawyer, who says his client has been the victim of unreliable scientific methods."

Link2
"The main issue at the Privy Council was it was novel and we had an unusual factual scenario that this IHC was carried out on a sample that wasn't preserved clinically," says Mr Eaton. He hints that the defence may have erred in accepting subsequent expert opinion that the testing was legitimate.

Link3
"Earlier, Mr Eaton said it was possible an "unidentified male" was involved in the murders, as there was unexplained male DNA under Christine's fingernails and hair clutched in her hands."

__________________“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.” – Winston Churchill

Day 2 in court says there is a searching inquiry pending on the idea juries can become arbiters of science.
Tomorrow will find the Crown needing to be robust on the petrol, no jerry cans will be suggested.
Crown will lose on the only item they concede is "fresh evidence".

"Mark Lundy's appeal judge explores possibility brain tissue came from a pie" The title of this article is misleading, and the rest of the article is only slightly better. This is from Morgan: "Here we are in 2017 and again there is an argument [from the defence] that you cannot prove it is central nervous system tissue."

One problem is that some of the markers used are found in peripheral nervous tissue. I would hazard a guess that sausage or ground beef has peripheral nervous tissue (how could it not?).

__________________“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.” – Winston Churchill

"Mark Lundy's appeal judge explores possibility brain tissue came from a pie" The title of this article is misleading, and the rest of the article is only slightly better. This is from Morgan: "Here we are in 2017 and again there is an argument [from the defence] that you cannot prove it is central nervous system tissue."

One problem is that some of the markers used are found in peripheral nervous tissue. I would hazard a guess that sausage or ground beef has peripheral nervous tissue (how could it not?).

I learned that on the saturday before the monday/tuesday murders, Mark went to the wholesalers and bought a large mixed meat pack, and came home and cut it up, bagged it, and put it in the freezer. These always include sausages for example, but obviously plenty of beef and who knows what.
Christine ironed everything including polyester shirts, and washing was done in cold water powder that is poor at removing fat and grease.
The good quality dna from Christine is ideally explained by rubbing specks of meat to disappear them after washing, followed by ironing, that would explain the mashed in material Rod Miller described he was dealing with. It would also explain the skin flakes.
Since we know the shirt never left Petone because of the crime scene, this will always be described as the best solution by those closest to Christine.
Of course it would make no difference if this shirt was in this condition a week, a month earlier because it was not tested for 59 days after the killings.

If the convictions were to be overturned would you seek a retrial for Mr Lundy?
Philip Morgan immediately asked for the question to be suppressed, but it was immediately denied to the mendacious prosecutor.

Submissions are sought by next week from defence counsel.

Anyone who can interpret all this is welcome to have a go. My understanding is that the road to compensation is much easier without a retrial but I also hear the opposite.
So it appears to be a trick question.

If the convictions were to be overturned would you seek a retrial for Mr Lundy?
Philip Morgan immediately asked for the question to be suppressed, but it was immediately denied to the mendacious prosecutor.

Submissions are sought by next week from defence counsel.

Anyone who can interpret all this is welcome to have a go.

Perhaps a response along the lines of it being impossible for him to get a fair trial by jury (this was obvious to blind Freddie before the 2015 trial), so if a retrial were *ordered*, the defence position should be trial by judge. I think that would chop off Mr. Morgan's "wife's brain on the shirt" theatrics and his current obsession with pork chops (as described by Steve Braunias in the Herald) at the knees

Anyway, why is the judge asking the defence if they would like a retrial? Surely their answer would be no, and put the ball into the Crown's court. I think the public appetite for a third Lundy trial is well and truly exhausted, I can't see them throwing millions more dollars at it when he has probably only got 5-6 years of his sentence left

One problem is that some of the markers used are found in peripheral nervous tissue. I would hazard a guess that sausage or ground beef has peripheral nervous tissue (how could it not?).

Ground beef and sausage both contain traces of CNS tissue with GFAP detectable at low levels...even after heating at 180 F for 60 minutes. Not sure how Morgan claims that it has to be "fresh and smearable" in the the transcript above....clearly you can cook it and still detect CNS.

Perhaps a response along the lines of it being impossible for him to get a fair trial by jury (this was obvious to blind Freddie before the 2015 trial), so if a retrial were *ordered*, the defence position should be trial by judge. I think that would chop off Mr. Morgan's "wife's brain on the shirt" theatrics and his current obsession with pork chops (as described by Steve Braunias in the Herald) at the knees

Anyway, why is the judge asking the defence if they would like a retrial? Surely their answer would be no, and put the ball into the Crown's court. I think the public appetite for a third Lundy trial is well and truly exhausted, I can't see them throwing millions more dollars at it when he has probably only got 5-6 years of his sentence left

There seem to be different views on speedy compensation.
The question of retrial seems easy to answer for inmate (for want of a better term).
Arcane legal principals must be in play.

More submissions from both sides requested. Hard Cheese's link may be very helpful.

Also existence of Christine's dna is routinely explained by family and friends as Christine rubbing the stubborn spots after cold washing. Du Plessis identified skin flakes in the spots with his electron microscope.

I have read Dr. Temple-Camp's version of the stomach contents. His argument is that Christine's meal was eaten much later and that it was not the McDonald's meal because the potatoes were different. A portion of that argument is well taken (and also well known), but he fails to explain how Amber's stomach contents could be the same as Christine's. Yet as far as I am aware no pro-defense commenter has ever denied the possibility that Christine ate again; exactly the contrary is true. The implausibility in the prosecution's case is that Amber awoke and ate another meal identical to Christine's.

His brief discussion of the messenger RNA evidence fails even to acknowledge the existence of, let alone the credentials of the two defense witnesses. This is a glaring omission, and one that I have discussed at length elsewhere. If one is looking for a strictly pro-prosecution discussion of this case, his book is the place to find it.

__________________“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.” – Winston Churchill

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